A display panel has a substrate and pixel elements formed thereon. These pixel elements are substantially arranged in the form of a matrix having gate lines in rows and data lines in columns. The display panel is driven by a driving circuit including a gate driver and a data driver. The gate driver generates a plurality of gate signals (scanning signals) sequentially applied to the gate lines for sequentially turning on the pixel elements row-by-row. The data driver generates a plurality of source signals (data signals), i.e., sequentially sampling image signals, simultaneously applied to the data lines in conjunction with the gate signals applied to the gate lines for displaying an image on the panel.
In such a driving circuit, a shift register having multiple stages is utilized in the gate driver to generate the plurality of gate signals for sequentially driving the gate lines. To lower down costs, there have been efforts to integrate the shift register and the gate driver into a display panel. One of the efforts, for example, is to fabricate the shift register and the gate driver on a glass substrate of the panel, namely, the gate driver on array (GOA) arrangement, using amorphous silicon (a-Si) thin film transistors (TFTs), and/or low temperature polycrystalline silicon (LTPS) TFTs.
FIG. 12 shows a display panel 10 with a conventional GOA architecture 11 of a shift register formed thereon. The shift register has a plurality of stages 16. Each stage 16 generates a scanning signal for driving a corresponding pixel row of the display panel. For the GOA architecture 11, each stage 16 is formed on a substrate having a layout 13 with a height of H, which is the same as the height of a pixel row 12 of the display panel 10. As the high resolution is very demanded for high quality of image display, the shift register is usually designed to a great number of stages. Additionally, the circuit of each stage becomes more complicated as the display technology advances. This makes the GOA design of a display panel very complicated.
Therefore, a heretofore unaddressed need exists in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.